A business or enterprise may store information about various items in the form of electronic records. For example, a company might have an employee database where each row in the database represents a record containing information about a particular employee (e.g., the employee's name, date of hire, and salary). Moreover, different electronic records may actually be related to a single item. For example, a human resources database and a sales representative database might both contain records about the same employee. In some cases, it may be desirable to consolidate multiple records to create a single data store that contains a single electronic record for each item represented in the database. Such a goal might be associated with, for example, a master data management program.
Currently, the consolidation process in a master data management program is a manual, time consuming, and error prone operation. For example, a person might manually review records looking for potential duplicates. When a potential duplicate is found, he or she might investigate to determine the best way for the information to be combined. Such an approach, however, may even be impractical when a substantial number of records and/or data stores are involved.
Accordingly, a method and mechanism for accurately handling and/or merging data records may be provided in accordance with some embodiments described herein.